Rainbow Wahine ignoring negativity, focusing on improvement

For the Rainbow Wahine, last weekend's season opening tournament hardly went as planned.

The team went 0-3 at the Rainbow Wahine Invitational. They were swept by a lower ranked San Diego team, and played their best volleyball as the underdogs against a higher ranked UCLA team.

That winless start was Hawaii's first since 1980.

In this week's AVCA poll, the team fell out of the top-25 for just the 12th time in program history. Now, as UH looks to get back on track this weekend at the Rainbow Wahine Classic, they say a major key to course correcting is blocking out all the negativity and outside noise.

"I tell them stay off of social media," head coach Robyn Ah Mow-Santos said, when discussing how she's handling the slow start with her team.

"I said don't believe social media. There's a lot of people out there that have their own opinions which they're welcome to have. But if you get on there and you start believing what people say good or bad, if it's good, it'll pump your head up too big. If it's bad it'll bring you down. So stay off of it."

Ah Mow-Santos says the only thing she wants her squad to listen to is what comes from the coaching in the gym. With that she believes the team can move on from their winless opening weekend and get back on track.

"I asked them to work on one thing. I said work on one thing and make that one thing better," she said.

The team, she added, "has the fight. I've seen it already. The fans have seen it. ... Just every time we're working on one or two more things a game."